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Hi Danny,
Danny said:
... text about pointing as behavioral characteristic....
- the http: prefix means I have to fetch, right?
Didier replies:
Yes you are right, pointing is a kind of phenomenological behavior, you
go toward things or you perceive things with a certain intention (1).
Primates seems to posses an innate phenomenological engine (some other
mammals too and to some extend, several species).
HTTP is a strange beast since it is a protocol that in its very basic
nature includes some actions like get, post, delete, etc... So, HTTP is
a moniker for a set of actions. However, some want to use it to "name"
thing and ignore the set of action it represents. So it seems that
fundamentally, some confusion reign about what is really and HTTP URL:
a) an identifier
b) a locator
c) partisans of the dual theory like the one we already get in physics
(dual nature of light - particle and wave) think that it is both. Since
officially a URL is also a URI I guess they are right
d) a set of action. Seems that few today perceive that a lot of
confusion occurs because of a three facet nature of HTTP URL. 1)
identifier, 2) locator, 3) set of actions used to manipulate resources'
representations (i.e. documents)
Pro of HTTP URL used as identifier is that it is well known for anyone
having used a browser. The con is that the identifier is dependent on
the location (i.e. the domain). Persistent URL were proposed to resolve
this issue. A PURL resolve is simply a kind of proxy supposed to provide
permanency of the URL. Thus you can move the document from place to
place and still refer to it with the same unique identifier. A more
robust mechanism designed to reach the same goal has been proposed with
URNs. Since URNs' location could be resolved with the DNS records, a
more robust and decentralized architecture would be possible. However,
some reasons, URN resolvers never took off, among the reason is the
simple fact that browsers never included the proposed name resolution
mechanism.
So we ended up with some weird situations like having namespaces using
HTTP URL as unique identifier, but the potential action conveyed by the
HTTP URL means nothing. When you try to exert the option given to you by
the HTTP URL, you end up "out of the money", if not out of your mind in
front of such stupid things.
The bottom like is that by definition and based on the specs an HTTP URL
is
a) an identifier (since URLs and URNS are identifiers)
b) a locator (A universal Resource Locator)
c) a set of action since HTTTP represent a set of action.
When the last item is not present. A part is missing, the whole package
is not complete at its arrival. You got a bubble, a fad, nothing
concrete and a deny of your right to exert the inherent options to do
the actions specified in the HTTP protocol. Its no longer a protocol it
becomes an abstract thing living in the ether with muses waiting to be
awakened by some platonic mind.
It reminds me of the smurfs(2) using the word smurf for everything. It
seems that these days, the community is using "smurf talk" with HTTP
URL. Poor ET, how discouraged he is about us, primitive primates :-).
Maybe we need the Robinsons' robot(3) shaking his arms and saying
"danger", these guys are "lost in space" :-).
Cheers
Didier PH Martin
(1)
http://www.personalityresearch.org/courses/B15/notes/phenomenology.html
(2) http://www.smurf.com/
(3) http://www.lostinspacetv.com/
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